The Mathematics of Life: A Review

The Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart is a book that discusses the relationship between Mathematics and Biology.

Stewart, in the first few pages of the book, writes about revolutions that made ripples throughout the world of Biology which constructed the Science of Life that we know today.

He first discussed five of these revolutions. The first revolution was all about the invention of the microscope. This ground-breaking instrument helped scientists to better understand the nature of life from a microscopic perspective. The second revolution was the Classification of organisms. This was the age where Carl Linnaeus established a proper and orderly manner of classifying organisms according to their kingdom, class, order, genera, species, and such. The third revolution is about the theory of evolution. This theory was proposed by Charles Darwin. This theory discusses how organisms, ever since the beginning of time, adapted with their environment in order to survive. Those who were not able to adapt died and those who remained continued multiplying and produced better, more developed off-springs. The discovery of Genetics is the fourth revolution. Gregor Mendel was able to notice a pattern in the characteristics of peas and was able to conclude that there are factors within every organism which would determine the features an organism will have. The fifth revolution is the establishment of the actual structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is the foundation of every organism’s genetic make-up.  This helped understand further how the DNA works, which is very important in genetics.

Stewart goes on to discuss a sixth revolution which is mathematics. He states that though in the past mathematics and biology are two different things and though mathematics has always been just a tool used in biology, this relationship has been evolving and will continue to evolve until it is almost impossible to separate the two. Since a lot of mathematical principles, physics, chemistry, geometry and such are being used to explain some phenomenon in biology, mathematics has become very important in biology.

Mathematics can be used to explain phenomenon that happen inside an organism and around an organism. It is very thrilling to even just imagine what else mathematics can contribute to society, to people, to science, in the ages to come and even in the near future.